With the end of the year, and all the global warming hype, I've been trying to understand how hot 2007 really was globally and also the direction in which temperatures are now trending considering the satellite and near surface measurements at the NOAA and Hadley websites respectively. Of course raw numbers, graphed and ungraphed, can give a different impression depending on your starting point - be that 1979 when satellite data was first collected, 1900 when surface temperatures were already being collected, or 1998 the hottest year so far.
Nevertheless, the various data sets do suggest that globally 1998 is still far and away the hottest and that temperatures have been stable or in decline since then. Also given 1998 was so hot, and only ten years ago, and that increases and decreases in temperature tend to be incremental it is not surprising that last year can be described as the sixth or seventh warmest even if the trend is one of cooling. But is it?
Anyway, I was surprised, but also interested, to see the analysis by Lubos Motl at this blog (http://motls.blogspot.com ). He's a physicist and has been looking at the same data sets as I have over the last few days but coming to much more interesting and definitive conclusions including that the linear trend for the satellite data for the 1998 -2007 interval is -0.48C and that December 2007 was cooler than the average December since 1979.
Read the complete blog post here: http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/01/2007-warmest-year-on-record-coldest-in.html
[from http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/01/2007-warmest-year-on-record-coldest-in.html showing global cooling over the short interval 2005-2007]
Really SJT. So tell "it", in detail, again, for the 102nd time, just for readers who may have missed your scathing rebuttal. If your response really exists, and it is really that good, then you obviously won't mind repeating it again in detail.